The Daily Tonic: Scrap Metal

It was jazz yesterday, metal today, so to round out the week we’re now asking for your best legends, stories and anecdotes from the DJ/club scenes over the years.

Send them to hello@popbitch.com – and we’ll send you a bunch of digital goodies for the best.

Black Sabbath by Black Sabbath is widely considered to be the first heavy metal record. Its riff – and a lot of Sabbath’s music in general – makes extensive use of a musical interval known as the tritone, a.k.a. ‘Diabolus In Musica’ (‘The Devil In Music’.)

It’s commonly claimed that this interval was banned by the Church in the Middle Ages for being inherently evil, overly sexual and Satanic. The reason Black Sabbath came to use it so much is a little more prosaic though. Rather than trying to summon Satan, guitarist Tony Iommi just found the interval comfortable to play after he lost the tips of two of his fingers in a workplace accident.

FYI: Iommi made his own replacement fingertips using melted down Fairy Liquid bottles.

In their early days, Metallica used to lay on a big coke spread for everyone at their shows backstage, requesting that their logo be drawn out in thick lines on a mirror, accompanied with little silver spoons so that anyone who wanted some could help themselves.

When middle age and rehab beckoned in later years, their backstage demands changed. Rather than request mountains of gak, they brought a chiropractor along on tour with them instead.

The after-show parties were much more sedate affairs, with most guests standing around chatting, having a few drinks, etc. Except for one member of the band who was still partial to the odd sniff. He would spend the later part of the evening trying to snort a line off the top of the chiropractor’s bald head.

We’ve mentioned in previous issues that Phil Collins used to have an ‘ambiance technician’ whose job it was to set up a hidden room out of flight cases offstage so Phil could nip off mid-set to get a little sharpener if he needed it.

Guns’N’Roses had the opposite.

When Izzy Stradlin was in the midst of his worst heroin phase, he suffered from such paranoia and panic onstage that the band had a replica of his living room built just offstage.

Whenever Izzy started to freak out, he’d be directed to this living room where he could centre himself and calm down before re-joining the others.

MOC writes:
“In 2011, a colleague invited me to a Tuesday night pub quiz at the (now sadly closed) Magdala Tavern in Hampstead. Due to poor weather there were only a handful of teams who made it: one of which was the band Anthrax. They left before the last round, so we came third by default.”

PM writes:
“In about 1994, a mate dragged me along to see Bruce Dickinson after he’d left Iron Maiden at a pub in Manchester. During the show, Dickie would stand on the stage monitor and do his long-arm pointing thing, sweeping the crowd just as he did at Wembley Stadium a few years earlier.”

You get a point for each title and a point for each original artist.

[Ten songs; twenty points]

Rage Against The Machine x Lou Bega
[Monicas On Parade]

Local News Of The Day: Hit and Run Clown Edition
[Read on Rotherham Advertiser]

Otters solving puzzles
[Watch on Twitter]

An interview with the owner of the sex shop by Four Seasons Total Landscaping
[Read on Slate]